Jared departed immediately after lunch, with Scott accompa­nying him to the lobby. On the way out Scott picked up a brown mailing envelope and handed it to Jared, saying he might be interested in the contents. “It’s a photocopy of a fragment from a book called De Nihil Natura by Ludovico Verro, a brilliant eighteenth-century mathema­tician. I recently purchased it for nearly a million bucks. The book was put on the Vatican’s Index of Prohibited Books and a concerted effort was made to destroy all of them. None are known to survive but this fragment. You might find it interesting.”